The Ford Capri Laser Page

Evening all,

Just thought I would share a recent experience I had with the idling speed on my Capri, the engine is a nicely jazzed up Essex V6 but for months now I haven't been able to get the idle speed right, sometimes it would idle at 950 then 1100 then 1300 then back to 850 and so on.... I messed around with the timing, mixture on the carb, looked for vacuum leaks, you name it I tried it and still she kept doing it until, coming home from work the other night, the idle speed went nuts and shot up to nearly 1500 rpm, I got the car home, breathed I sigh of relief and parked her up, went out there this weekend with the intention having another shot at finding the problem, when I pressed the accelerator pedal to activate the choke the throttle cable snapped instantly at the point where it comes into the car and about an inch from where it hooks up to the pedal, I've replaced the cable and now the idle is perfect no fluctuations at all, so all this time it was just the cable fraying and getting caught as it goes through the bulkhead and had nothing what so ever to do with engine or it's ancillaries, I won't lie if the cable hadn't snapped I never would have thought it's the cable getting snagged up, hopefully my experience may come in useful to other forum members

Wayne

Superb, this is exactly the sort of experiential information that you won`t find in a book and it adds to the `knowledge base` of this forum for anyone in the future with a similar, erratic,seemingly inexplicable problem. Thanks for posting.

Yes brilliant tip there !! It's amazing how sometimes our old cars still manage to baffle us from time to time we tend to overcomplicate things sometimes.

Thanks for posting your adventures …… this one is saved in the memory banks should mine start misbehaving

This is really interesting. Thanks for posting.

For some time I’ve been having an occasional engine surge whilst accelerating. I’ve been racking my brains trying to think what might be causing this – slipping clutch, vacuum leak, carburettor, fuel delivery, etc. Then when it happened one day I thought to myself it feels almost as if something mechanical is sticking then suddenly releasing. But as I’m not at all mechanically minded I dismissed the idea as too simplistic. The cable may or may not be the culprit but at least you’ve given me something else to consider.

These cars do have a habit of pointing us in the wrong direction when things go wrong, don’t they?

My accelerator pedal was hard to depress, I sprayed the linkage/spring with WD40 which made no difference, so had the cable replaced and now all good.

The cable must have been fraying inside the sleeve and snagging.

Just sounds like something else I'm going to add to the list for the sake of it - would rather change it now than wait until it breaks!

Hi all,

It is a fantastic feeling to cure a long term problem but one other thing I learnt from this is to take what you read across the internet with a pinch of salt, the carburetor on my car is a 390 Holley and I read so many stories about this particular carburetor being all wrong for the Essex engine, it's too big etc etc. that I almost convinced myself in the end that the carburetor and only the carburetor must be the cause of the issue and thus spent at least at £100 on different tuning components for it which as i now know could have been better spent elsewhere.

The internet is a great place with unlimited information but sometimes that can work against you that's why dedicated websites like this will always be your best friend for information.

As a wise man said to me recently, Sometimes advice you get from the Internet is worth exactly what you paid for it ..

Wayne